1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, a method and a computer program product for processing email, and an apparatus for searching email that set search conditions for searching an email document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, email applications are widely used by users to transmit, receive, and view emails. Many of these email applications include functions for searching emails stored in a storage unit such as a hard disk.
Many email search functions of conventional email applications can search for a target email using, in addition to keywords, attribute information such as reception time, size, email addresses of sender and recipient, and whether a file is attached, as search conditions.
Recently however, with the proliferation of networking and developments in computer technology, there is a tendency towards increasing the capacity of emails saved by users in applications. Email search functions are consequently becoming important.
In conventional email search functions, when a large amount of emails are saved in an email application, unless the user sets appropriate keywords and attribute information as the search conditions, a large amount of emails will be detected as search results. To detect his target email, the user must therefore perform an appropriate sort and the like based on the reception time, email address of the sender, email title, and so on, leading to a problem that it takes a long time to detect the target email.
To avoid such problems, when searching for an email, the user must set search conditions for obtaining a smaller number of search results. However, to set appropriate keywords and appropriate attribute information, he must remember the specific type of the email, or repeat by trial and error until he can set appropriate keywords and attribute information. This leads to a problem, because setting the search conditions is troublesome and time-consuming.
A technique disclosed in JP-A 2004-355166 (KOKAI) maintains a database for storing keywords, and narrows down additional keywords used in a search by referring to this database. An email is searched for using the keywords and additional keywords. This can prevent a large amount of emails from being detected.
However, the technique disclosed in JP-A 2004-355166 (KOKAI) has a problem such that, because relativity between a specified document and a document that is the search target is unclear, it is not known whether the document that is the search target contains the detected additional keywords. Moreover, this search technique is not specialized for email searches.